How Insect Are We? is the title of the symposium that opens Pestival, a three-day festival starting today and running to 6 September to celebrate insects in art, and the art of being of an insect.

80% of creatures on earth are bugs – that's more than a million insect species – without whom humans would not survive. Yet insects are frequently misunderstood, reviled or, at best, ignored by the majority of the human population. Pestival aims to challenge stereotypes about insects and to give them their rightful place in our collective cultural consciousness. Architecture, art, comedy, film, music, sound, technology are coming together to celebrate how much insects shape our world and how humans shape the world of insects.

According to ant biologist and Stanford professor, Deborah Gordon, who has been studying the same ant colony for 20 years in the Arizona desert, new social networks like Facebook and Twitter work very much like insects in swarms and colonies. So at the opening symposium she will be arguing that humans are getting closer to behaving like insects than ever before.

The main theme of Pestival, at the Southbank Centre, is the collapse of bee colonies around the world. To raise awareness of the plight of bees, the Queen Elizabeth Hall is being transformed into the Queen Bee Hall – a giant bee hive hosting talks, discussions and bee-related art and music on the larvae stage. There'll be LottoLab's The Bee Matrix, an exhibit of glass, light and bumblebees – part science experiment, part sculpture. Susanna Soares will showcase her "Pavlov's bee device". Bees have a phenomenal odour perception, meaning they can be trained within minutes using Pavlov's reflex to target a specific odour and their range of detection includes pheromones, toxins and disease diagnosis. Beekeepers will also be on hand to give urban beekeeping advice.

As co-author of A World Without Bees, a book that charts the demise of the honeybee, I have been invited by Pestival founder and director, Bridget Nicholls, to be a virtual queen bee for the day, serving my 50,000-strong colony in a mass roleplay by human beings of a bee colony on Twitter's Tweehive. The idea is to raise bee awareness, wonderment, interest, actions and to generate traffic to bee-related sites and resources.

Outside the Queen Bee Hall a black cab has been transformed into a bumblebee in full flight, complete with a working beehive in the front seat and a mini cinema in the back showing films about bees and beekeeping.

But it's not all about bees. Human-sized chrysalises will be hanging from the ceiling of the Royal Festival Hall, courtesy of artist Jane Wafer and there will be urban insect garden on the balcony. A centrepiece of the event is a huge Termite Pavilion designed by a team of architects and engineers who have scaled up a scan of a central section of a termite mound to a size that allows humans to move through it (below).

Pestival sounds a lot of fun and, if it helps in any small way to raise awareness about the importance of insects, the threats they are facing and why it is important we save them, then it will also make a difference.

• Alison Benjamin will be tweeting live from Pestival on our environment blog this Saturday